Who was worse than Donald Trump? His dad, says his niece
A vengeful account by the US President’s niece is a powerful portrait of what is depicted as a truly horrible family.
There are no hidden grudges in this bleak book and there is no hidden agenda. It’s all right out there. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father,” writes Mary Trump, the US President’s niece, in the prologue, adding, “I can’t let him destroy my country.”
It has become standard among the more cynical commentators, as well as quasi-apologists for Donald Trump, to say of any set of disclosures that all they reveal is Trump being Trump, and that his “unusual” or “unorthodox” way of doing things is priced in by the American electorate. So move along, they urge, there’s nothing to see here.
And despite the strenuous legal efforts made by the Trump family to suppress this book on the grounds that the author has violated a non-disclosure agreement, the same will be said of Mary L Trump’s revelations.
But this time a reader searching for what anxious program researchers with airtime to fill call “nuggets” may indeed be disappointed. This is not a book full of shocking Trump anecdotes, although there are one or two. It is something else altogether; it’s a psychological profile of a horrible family. And if there is a villain here, it’s not the man who has become the worst US president of the modern era, it’s his dreadful father, Fred Trump.
Donald is one of five children of Fred and Mary Trump. The oldest boy was Fred Jr, who was the author’s father. He died of a heart attack at the age of 42 and Mary L Trump believes that the way he was belittled and bullied by Fred Sr and the family, and especially by Donald, contributed to his alcoholism and early death, which happened when she was 12.
Fred Sr was a builder, salesman and developer who became an expert in getting government cash for building cheap housing for postwar New Yorkers. By the time he died in 1999 his business and property empire was worth up to $US1 billion (currently $1.43bn). His awfulness did not lie in any gothic qualities of violence or sexual abuse, but in mundane ones of neglect and complete lack of empathy. He didn’t like black people, he didn’t like women, he didn’t like losers.
His wife had been weakened by illness, but Fred was utterly uninterested in the wellbeing of his children, except insofar as he could despise them for their softness or lack of drive. “One of the few pleasures my grandfather had,” Mary writes, “apart from making money, was humiliating others.” In all the time she knew him, before dementia eroded his rock face, she had only ever seen him look “contemptuous, annoyed, angry, amused and self-satisfied”.
His daughters, Maryanne and Elizabeth, were hardly worthy of his consideration. His youngest son, Robert, was a weedy afterthought. That left young Fred – fond of flying planes and sailing boats – who quickly understood that he was a disappointment to his father. And it left Donald. “Donald is worth ten of you!” Fred Trump once told his eldest son, in front of employees. Donald was then at high school. When Fred Jr got out of the family business to follow his dream of becoming an airline pilot, Fred sent Donald to see him. “You know, Dad’s really sick of you wasting your life,” Donald told his elder brother, then said, “Dad’s right about you: you’re nothing but a glorified bus driver.”
As Fred Jr lay dying in hospital, Donald and his wife went to the cinema. Mary hadn’t been told. No one was with him when he expired. To Mary, years later, it is unforgiveable. Trained as a psychologist, she links the two brother’s different fates to their being sons of such a father. “Donald,” she writes, “continues to exist in the dark space between the fear of indifference and the fear of failure that led to his brother’s destruction.”
Donald was not a nice boy, it seems. He hid his younger brother’s best-loved toys and was ungovernable to his mother, a slob at home and a roisterer at school. In a disputed passage, Mary claims that he also learnt to use his wealth to cheat early in life, employing a brighter boy to take his college admission test for him.
Yet somehow this increasingly brash, outwardly self-confident young man became his father’s anointed. In essence, Fred’s business bankrolled a whole series of often dubious ventures that, even if they failed, Donald used to boost his brand image. In 1979 alone he borrowed $US6m from his father to keep his schemes afloat.
Even so, his dealings were precarious enough for his creditor banks to insist that he live on an allowance. At one point he tells the young Mary that he regrets her mother (Fred’s wife) being given an allowance by the family since it meant she wouldn’t stand on her own two feet. “I didn’t know it at the time,” she says, “but when we had that conversation, Donald was still receiving his $US450,000 allowance from the banks every month.”
So what was he being paid to do? In the early 1990s, on what seems like a whim, Donald asked Mary to work with him on a new book. So she went to work in his office and tried to catch some time with him to get his ideas. He was always too busy, always on a call about golf or women, or looking through his cuttings. Finally, 10 pages did arrive from him on her desk. “It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date, but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, fattest slobs he’d ever met.”
As part of her research Mary, then 29, flew down to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort. One day she was on the patio in her swimsuit when her uncle looked her over and said: “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked.” Never mind stacked, not long afterwards she was sacked from the project. “After all the time I had spent in his office,” she concludes, “I still had no idea what he did.”
Looking at him now, as he flounders in the pandemic crisis, she believes that this man, unchanged, is now in trouble. “Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under has changed dramatically,” she observes. “It’s not the stress of the job because he isn’t doing the job – unless watching TV and tweeting insults count. It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing . . . that requires an enormous amount of work . . . His entire sense of himself and the world is being questioned.”
Before his father died in 1999 Donald attempted – and failed – to become sole executor. Even so, when the will was read, the old man had effectively cut out the children of his one dead son. So Mary and her brother contested the will, and the two parts of the family didn’t speak for a decade after an eventual settlement. When she learnt that the will was being contested her grandmother phoned to try to stop the case. “’Do you know what your father was worth when he died?’ she asked Mary. ‘A whole lot of nothing.’”
The reader may decide that the author would be more morally convincing if she had walked away from the money and the family. For all that the book is well-written and unemotive, the author never analyses herself and her motives. Yet running through every chapter is the theme of getting some recognition from this cold, conscienceless family for the tragedy of her father’s life and death.
And they are truly awful. One Christmas, when she was 30, Mary was given a Timex watch by her aunt Elizabeth. It was a child’s watch and her aunt revealed that it had originally been a present for Mary 20 years earlier. But “you were only 10, and I thought you were too young to have something that nice”, said her aunt. “So I took it.”
There is one consolation, and it comes near the end of the book. Reconciled after a decade, Mary is invited to the wedding of Donald’s daughter Ivanka to Jared Kushner. “Before the vows,” she recalls, “Jared’s father, Charles, who’d been released from prison three years earlier, rose to tell us he had thought she’d never be good enough to join his family . . . Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party, I found his condescension a bit out of line.”
The consolation is that there are even worse families than the joyless, horrible Trumps. We can comfort ourselves with that.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L Trump (Simon & Schuster, 240pp)
The Times
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